On the journey to perfecting coffee, you set a general direction for where you want to go, but at the same time, each new step opens the door to countless other paths. It’s really easy to get lost and overwhelmed at first, but at the same time, it brings excitement. There’s no such thing as perfect coffee, but that’s the fun part. Perfecting coffee is something you can devote your whole life to and will still be able to learn something new everyday. Here is our more updated version of the D.I.Y. Slow Drip Cold Brewing Station. We used the pour over stand Jimmy beautifully built and stained for me to told up a blender jar, which just so happens to hold a Deer Park water bottle perfectly. This additionally height allows the water droplets to disperse wider throughout the coffee bed, leading to a more evenly extracted cold brew.

At this point, we’ve brewed about 5 more times, tinkering with different variables. Your variables are going to be: -water temperature and amount of water -drip rate, which determines your brew time -coffee grind and coffee dosing -pre-infusing or not pre-infusing, as well as the temperature of pre-infusion and length With all those variables, it makes for a hell of a science experiment!

Troubleshooting:

My coffee tastes just like “coffee”: Cold brewing allows for some flavor nuances to express (which happens less often), and some favor nuances to be latent, such as acidity and sweetness. It just all depends on the type of coffee. We’ve found that pre-infusing or even pre-brewing with hot water can help bring out subtle flavors.

My coffee is under-extracted: Play around with your grind size and make sure your coffee is even and level to prevent water from channeling. Also, we prefer hotter water to bring out the flavors of lighter roasts, so perhaps a cold brewing method is more suitable for darker roasts. However, as Counter Culture says, ANY COFFEE AND BREW.

My drip rate is too fast or too slow: Experiment with different size needles. In our next version of the D.I.Y. Slow Drip Cold Brewing Station, we will address this issue by adding a 2-way drip valve. Please leave us some questions and comments below! We’ve love to hear from you!

Everyone’s drinking cold brew. A few companies, like Stumptown Coffee, have even started bottling it to sell at coffee shops and grocery stores. Popularity is on the rise because the cold brew method prevents certain acidic, bitterness-inducing compounds from appearing, creating a smooth and syrupy finish well-suited for iced coffee. That, and the equipment used to achieve that delicious nectar looks totally badass.

This is the Yama cold water drip tower. It makes delicious cold brew coffee, but more importantly, it looks like a steampunk meth lab (think Heisenberg in goggles and a top hat). It also costs $295 and takes up a lot of counter space. No, we’re not expecting you to use this at home.

A little searching online got us to Cafe Prima’s DIY Cold brew tower using the Aeropress and just a standard water bottle. We decided to give it a test run.

As you can see by the slow, methodical dripping, this D.I.Y. method is essentially an unholy combination of an Aeropress and Chinese water torture. The brew took a total of 1.5 hours for 330 mL of water to pass through and we ended up with 280 mL of brewed coffee. If you’re interested in why we used 185 degree water for pre-infusion, check out this really interesting article about combination hot and cold brewing.

Sometime in the near future, we’re going to attempt to create a more advanced model that more closely resembles the Yama Brewing tower. Expect more glass, controllable valves, and gnarly wood.